~ Runnin' 'Round in My Mind

Category Archives: suicide

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” ~J. K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling didn’t originate the idea of the quote, and the quote in various forms has been around since probably the 1700s or so, it’s a recurring theme in the Harry Potter novels.

Lately, I’ve experienced the meaning of this quote on many levels to the point where I just want to say to certain people, “Fuck off, you wankers”, and yet I feel constricted by my own upbringing, my own issues, and societal norms. So I don’t.

It makes me want to do something better with my writing, something with more purpose, or perhaps, to do it with people who actually care about other people. I can absorb cussing, outright yelling, (most of the time), off-colour jokes, blue comedy, and all the other types of shit that comes out of humans’ mouths.

What I hate, abhor, is when someone is so uncaring, manipulative, and downright subtle with their evil plans to destroy a person’s confidence, self-esteem, self-worth, even if to destroy those things for another human in the moment.

What the fuck IS that? And why, WHY do women seem to be the ones I observe who mostly do this? And why do they do it mostly to each other?

On a side note, I’ve discovered something else in my recent project: millennials are pure crap at managing others. The reason they do? They don’t care. And people drive everything, not machines, not technology, not deadlines. To motivate people, you have to first care about them.

So imagine you don’t care and are delivering news to someone about not meeting certain expectations. Imagine that, because you haven’t gotten to know the person at all because again, you don’t care, that when you deliver the news, factually and without compassion, you have no idea that the person has a history of depression. Imagine again that because you don’t care, and because you are a soulless human being who only cares about the work and not the people involved, that the person is now suicidal. Imagine that the person dies because, although not the specific root cause of why, you are the immediate cause of the person’s suicide.

Imagine not caring enough to find out what has happened when the person doesn’t show up for an important meeting. What if the person lives alone, doesn’t have any true friends, and is in a very solo profession? So you don’t check on the person. Because you don’t care.

Imagine a world of depressed people walking the planet, feeling alone, and one interaction, even if necessary but negative and done in a cruel way, could be the immediate cause of someone’s suicide.

If you were even remotely uncomfortable with reading the word suicide, you should be. People don’t like the word. About every 15 minutes, a person commits suicide. That’s about 4 people every hour. And for each person who commits suicide, another handful of people are seriously affected by it.

So if someone tells you they have been suicidal in the past or that that they suffer from depression or both, listen to them. Stop doing what you’re doing and listen to them. Show compassion. Show caring.

Otherwise, imagine when you are at the lowest point in your life and look back at who you have helped along the way, who you have listened to, who you have treated fairly and compassionately, only to discover that you have treated no one that way. Imagine that even the people you thought loved you the most have finally had enough of the way you’ve treated them, too, and imagine that at that lowest point, you have no one. Because you are an asshole, a total, and complete bitch. You have treated others in a way that is not even becoming of any human being. You are absolutely worthless, which is interesting considering that is how someone who commits suicide feels.